You’ve seen them on Instagram, Twitter, and even on news sites: those impossible photos and videos, which used to be the privilege of professionals, showing amateur athletes perfecting their skills. Sometimes they show incredible stunts, other times incredible stupidity, but they all share one common trait – they were taken from an angle that simply was not possible without a professional photographer five years ago.

Some, like GeekWire, have even gone so far to dub these personal machines “selfie drones.”

However, until recently these videos still needed a pilot to drive the drone, which means that the person who wishes to be recorded must bring a friend along who does not want to participate in the activity. This can be impractical for a number of situations – from solitary activities to groups of friends in which every member is excited about the activity.

Follow the Leader

Enter, the Lily Drone, brainchild of two UC Berkeley students, Antoine Balaresque and Henry Bradlow. This drone isn’t driven – it follows you on it’s own. Or more specifically, it follows a tag you keep on your person.

As shown in the demo video, you simply throw Lily into the air, activate your tracker tag, and the drone will take up to 20 minutes of video. The user can set it to either follow or lead, and the image quality is absolutely spectacular for an amateur tool – 1080 HD videos at 60fps, fully slo-mo capable, and completely waterproof. The whole thing weighs in at under 3 pounds, and can fit easily in a backpack. The main drawback seems to be the battery life, as the device requires two hours to be at full power again. You may wonder, how is this being received? Are there people who aren’t into extreme sports willing to plunk down around a grand to have a Lily? The answer is yes. The company has not only raised $15 million in investment, but also recently reported that they’ve collected $34 million in pre-sales. They’ve also made some important hires, including Doug Chan, formerly of Nest Labs and VP of Operations at Dropcam, as well as a manufacturing team that collaborated on the Flip Video camera and Dropcam.

Implications

Every so often, we have the pleasure of witnessing the first successful rendition of a category that will become a household necessity within the next few years. The Lily has the potential to be the iPhone of drones – by making the category accessible and attractive to average Joes and Janes, they open up an entire market that simply did not exist previously.

We’ll be watching the Lily closely, and keeping an eye out for the first knock-offs and improved competitor products.

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Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.
However, EU users have to agree to the new terms of service in order to continue using Facebook, Recode point out, after asking Facebook how the worldwide experience differs from the one being shown in Europe.
Elsewhere in the world, users who dismiss the prompt twice will be automatically opted in.
But before you close that window too quickly, you may want to take a look at what Facebook is asking.
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
Review Your Privacy Settings
Posted by Facebook on Wednesday, May 23, 2018
In the new prompt, which appears when you visit News Feed, Facebook will allow you to review details about advertising, facial recognition, and the information you’ve chosen to share on your profile.
For example, you may no longer feel comfortable having your religion, political views or relationship information exposed, and the new experience will allow you to change those settings.
As you continue reviewing your information, each screen will walk you through what data is collected and how it’s used, allowing you to make better decisions about Facebook’s use of your data.
Specially, Facebook says the feature will include the following information:
How it uses data from partners to show more relevant advertising
Political, religious, and relationship information you’ve chosen to include on your profile
How it uses face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy
Updates to its terms of service and data policy (that were announced in April)
If you’ve already disabled some of these settings, you won’t be shown that information or encouraged to turn the features back on.
After you adjust your settings, the changes go into effect immediately and you can adjust them again at any time from Settings or Privacy Shortcuts, the company says.
Though the GDPR is aimed at protecting user data in the EU, Facebook has come under fire for its breach of trust with its user base due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where data was hijacked from 87 million users without their consent. The company is now revisiting a lot of its user data privacy practices and making changes as result of both that and GDPR’s requirements.
The experience will start popping up on Facebook this week.
... Read More

Created to help app developers find and fix bugs more efficiently, Sentry announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series B led by returning investors NEA and Accel. Both firms participated in Sentry’s Series A round two years ago.
Co-founder and CEO David Cramer tells TechCrunch that the new round puts Sentry’s post-money valuation at around $100 million. The company recently launched Sentry 9, which, like its other software, is open source. Sentry 9 lets app developers integrate error remediation into their workflows by automatically notifying the developers responsible for that part of the code, letting them filter by environment to hone in on the issue, and manage collaboration among different teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to fix bugs from “five hours to five minutes,” Sentry claims.
The company will “double down on developers and their adjacent roles,” in particular product teams, Cramer says. Next in the pipeline is tools that will answer more in-depth questions related to app performance management.
“Today we answer ‘this specific thing is broken, why?’ Next we’ll expand that into deeper insights whether it’s ‘these sets of things are broken for the same reason’ as well as exploring non-errors. For example, if you deploy an update to your product and traffic to your sign-up form goes to zero that’s pretty serious, even if you’re not generating errors,” Cramer says.
Sentry’s technology originated as an internal tool for exception logging in Djana applications while its founders, Chris Jennings and Cramer, were working at Disqus. After they open-sourced it, the software quickly expanded into more programming languages. Sentry launched a hosted service in 2012 to answer demand. It now claims to have 9,000 paying customers (including Airbnb, Dropbox, PayPal, Twitter and Uber), be used by 500,000 engineers and process more than 360 billion errors a year.
In a press statement, Accel partner Dan Levine said “Sentry’s growth is a testament to the now-universal truth that app users everywhere expect a flawless experience free of bugs and crashes. Poor user experience kills companies. In order to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, product teams need to know that customers will never leave because of a broken app update. Sentry lets every developer build software that is functionally error-free.”
... Read More

Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.
However, EU users have to agree to the new terms of service in order to continue using Facebook, Recode point out, after asking Facebook how the worldwide experience differs from the one being shown in Europe.
Elsewhere in the world, users who dismiss the prompt twice will be automatically opted in.
But before you close that window too quickly, you may want to take a look at what Facebook is asking.
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
Review Your Privacy Settings
Posted by Facebook on Wednesday, May 23, 2018
In the new prompt, which appears when you visit News Feed, Facebook will allow you to review details about advertising, facial recognition, and the information you’ve chosen to share on your profile.
For example, you may no longer feel comfortable having your religion, political views or relationship information exposed, and the new experience will allow you to change those settings.
As you continue reviewing your information, each screen will walk you through what data is collected and how it’s used, allowing you to make better decisions about Facebook’s use of your data.
Specially, Facebook says the feature will include the following information:
How it uses data from partners to show more relevant advertising
Political, religious, and relationship information you’ve chosen to include on your profile
How it uses face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy
Updates to its terms of service and data policy (that were announced in April)
If you’ve already disabled some of these settings, you won’t be shown that information or encouraged to turn the features back on.
After you adjust your settings, the changes go into effect immediately and you can adjust them again at any time from Settings or Privacy Shortcuts, the company says.
Though the GDPR is aimed at protecting user data in the EU, Facebook has come under fire for its breach of trust with its user base due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where data was hijacked from 87 million users without their consent. The company is now revisiting a lot of its user data privacy practices and making changes as result of both that and GDPR’s requirements.
The experience will start popping up on Facebook this week.
... Read More

Created to help app developers find and fix bugs more efficiently, Sentry announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series B led by returning investors NEA and Accel. Both firms participated in Sentry’s Series A round two years ago.
Co-founder and CEO David Cramer tells TechCrunch that the new round puts Sentry’s post-money valuation at around $100 million. The company recently launched Sentry 9, which, like its other software, is open source. Sentry 9 lets app developers integrate error remediation into their workflows by automatically notifying the developers responsible for that part of the code, letting them filter by environment to hone in on the issue, and manage collaboration among different teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to fix bugs from “five hours to five minutes,” Sentry claims.
The company will “double down on developers and their adjacent roles,” in particular product teams, Cramer says. Next in the pipeline is tools that will answer more in-depth questions related to app performance management.
“Today we answer ‘this specific thing is broken, why?’ Next we’ll expand that into deeper insights whether it’s ‘these sets of things are broken for the same reason’ as well as exploring non-errors. For example, if you deploy an update to your product and traffic to your sign-up form goes to zero that’s pretty serious, even if you’re not generating errors,” Cramer says.
Sentry’s technology originated as an internal tool for exception logging in Djana applications while its founders, Chris Jennings and Cramer, were working at Disqus. After they open-sourced it, the software quickly expanded into more programming languages. Sentry launched a hosted service in 2012 to answer demand. It now claims to have 9,000 paying customers (including Airbnb, Dropbox, PayPal, Twitter and Uber), be used by 500,000 engineers and process more than 360 billion errors a year.
In a press statement, Accel partner Dan Levine said “Sentry’s growth is a testament to the now-universal truth that app users everywhere expect a flawless experience free of bugs and crashes. Poor user experience kills companies. In order to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, product teams need to know that customers will never leave because of a broken app update. Sentry lets every developer build software that is functionally error-free.”
... Read More